"Why Do Blacks Live in the Cities and Whites Live in the
Suburbs?"
BY: MATTHEW E. KAHN
Tufts University
The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy
PATRICK BAJARI
Stanford University
Department of Economics
Document: Available from the SSRN Electronic Paper Collection:
http://papers.ssrn.com/paper.taf?abstract_id=263049
Other Electronic Document Delivery:
http://www.stanford.edu/~bajari/wp/housing/city.pdf
SSRN only offers technical support for papers
downloaded from the SSRN Electronic Paper Collection
location. When URLs wrap, you must copy and paste
them into your browser eliminating all spaces.
Date: March 2001
Contact: MATTHEW E. KAHN
Email: Mailto:matt.kahn at tufts.edu
Postal: Tufts University
The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy
Medford, MA 02155 USA
Co-Auth: PATRICK BAJARI
Email: Mailto:bajari at leland.stanford.edu
Postal: Stanford University
Department of Economics
Stanford, CA 94305-6072 USA
ABSTRACT:
This paper estimates a discrete choice model of housing product
demand to study the causes of black urbanization. Our estimation
strategy incorporates that there are unobserved attributes which
are correlated with observed product attributes. We bound racial
differences in household willingness to pay for product
attributes without implementing an instrumental variables
strategy. Thus, we relax a number of assumptions implicit in
"hedonic two step" housing research. Our primary explanation for
excess black urbanization focuses on the disutility from
commuting and the bundling of housing and labor markets.
Keywords: Housing demand, commuting, sprawl, race